"All-Play" introduces a social play experience for the Wii
The Wii has often found itself positioned in a strange area for gaming, some companies want to take the console seriously and struggle to churn out a title that really meets their expectations, while others turn out quick party games and hope to reap fast profits. EA is a company that has tried to make a decent title but has always somewhat struggled to feel out the marketplace with a decent offering in regards to the sports genre.
This year EA brings out the "All-Play" line of games to Wii owners, working on delivering a solid social experience with new controls and a change up of the presentation to accomidate the new play methods while still allowing other higher skill players to get in on the experience and have a good time.
The titles to come in under the "All-Play" line are Madden NFL 09, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09, NBA Live 09, and FIFA 09. Each title comes packing a unique feature set to change up how you experience the game.
Madden includes a feature called Call Your Shots allowing people to make their own plays on the fly and direct their receivers down their routes. To lighten the mood EA has also included a 5v5 mode with big heads and a smaller field length. To keep the competition high the game will also include multiple playbooks to accomidate the experience of the player.
Tiger Woods takes on the original concept and also includes a few mini games for casual play, the UI and and graphics take a revision for this year and the game sports what is claimed to be a "true to life"j golfing mechanic behind it all, on top of all that the game brings online play into the mix offering 4 players the ability to play at once.
NBA Live seems to be the one featuring the least amount of changes details only speak about more action and the offering of an over-the-top experience with more control options but no word as to what those really are.
FIFA gets a new treatment with 11v11 play or 8v8 arcade style play. The big change here is offering the ability to use your Mii alongside current all-star players in an arcade version of the sport. Players will be able to make insane shots by waving around their Wii-mote in game, probably causing some sort of chaos given the reception of Wii-Sports. On top of this the game boasts party games like Table Soccer and Boot It.
I will say that the FIFA announcement and lack of details from EA and EA Sports and the EA press site seem to possibly indicate that the FIFA experience on the Wii will be much more focused around a MySims style approach to it where all the characters are extremely stylized and moved away from the more realism oriented presentation.
Only time will tell how all of these pan out as we near their release through the late Summer and Fall of 08, hopefully some of these shape up to be decent offerings on the Wii which could benefit from some solid sports titles instead of really odd minigame fests which suffered from bad control or just rushed presentation.